Conference

It’s widely spread opinion that at some point of our career we, software people, should start giving speeches and talks. I’m firmly convinced that THAT is not for me, and I want to carve my ears out of my head every time I hear my heavily-accented-english, mixed with my ability to cut words and make the message come across barely understandable. But, this presentation was really important to me: I presented my-work-so-far on building a PhantomJS WebDriver. I call it GhostDriver (provisional name). ...

I have been spending a lot of time on PhantomJS in the last couple of months. But feels like I could have done much more: there are so many interesting issues to work on in the official tracker. ** Hey, why don’t you give us a hand? :) ** Some English expressions still puzzle me… Here is where my stake is. REPL I just finished putting down a new wiki page that explains a bit about the REPL and how it works. Give it a read and let me know if you want more clarification. ...

I’m just back from a very good conference. And for once, I can proudly say, it was organized by Italians! The host were WEBdeBS, a web company based in lovely Brescia, and the topic was… very hot: Node.JS. Node.JS Conference (@nodejsconfit) (on joind.in) has been hosted in the Centro Paolo VI, where talks well complemented by lovely Italian food. What else can you ask? A great addition to my collection of “hackshirts” ...

Last friday I have attended Full Frontal 2010, a one day JavaScript conference organised by Left Logic. This has been the second time the conference ran: the first was last year. Full Frontal 2010 It was a very inspiring and stimulating day, with a very very nice line of speakers, all coming from different, but yet connected, areas of the Front End Development scene. Left Logic is run by Remy Sharp, that made an very good job, together with his wife (sorry, I don’t recall her name right now), to organise, publicise and sell-out all the tickets, months before the conference. I guess next year the only problem for them will be to try to find a bigger venue: Duke of York’s Picturehouse in Brighton was a nice and cosy one, but the absence of decent WiFi connectivity, and the size of the cinema, will probably become a limit as this event gets more and more popular. ...

Just a quick one. First day of the Google I/O 2009 in San Francisco (CA). Apart from a lot of informative and interesting topics and breakout sessions (I mainly focused on App Engine and Android), I came back at home full of: Stickers T-shirt Google Chrome comic paperback version A brand new “Google I/O device”, that is a black HTC Magic sim and firmware unlocked for developers + Android Market with Paid Apps support + Amazon Mp3 store +…!!!. How much? For FREE, of course!!! ...

I was looking for info about [en:MapReduce] and I thought that would have been a good idea to take a look at the Tech Talks published by Google. Here we go. Title: 2007 Seattle Conference on Scalability: MapReduce Used on Large Geographic Data Sets Location: Google Tech Talks June 23, 2007 Speaker: Barry Brumitt, Google Inc. Abstract: MapReduce is a programming model and library designed to simplify distributed processing of huge datasets on large clusters of computers. This is achieved by providing a general mechanism which largely relieves the programmer from having to handle challenging distributed computing problems such as data distribution, process coordination, fault tolerance, and scaling. While working on Google maps, I’ve used MapReduce extensively to process and transform datasets which describe the earth’s geography. In this talk, I’ll introduce MapReduce, demonstrating its broad applicability through example problems ranging from basic data transformation to complex graph processing, all the in the context of geographic data. ...